Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: Seventeenth-Century Praise and Restoration Satire by A. B. Chambers (review)

Book Reviews69 nature versus violent nature in a close reading of three major literary works ofthe Sturm und Drang. Gerstenberg's Ugolino, Goethe's Die Leiden desjungen Werther, and Schiller's Die Räuber. All three interpretive studies are supported by ample translated quotes, which are given in the original German in the footnotes. In the tragic drama Ugolino, Brown examinee the nature motifs from the perspective ofthe Ugolino family, destined to starvation in the dungeon tower: "Nature's terror emerges, as the ideology of family intimacy gives way to competition among atomized individuals for power, property, and survival" (65). The best known work of the Sturm und Drang, Goethe's Werther, encodes the deterioration ofWerther's psyche, as his individual and radically subjective experience of the world leads him inevitably into isolation, alienation, and self-destruction. Here, the myth of idyllic and Homeric nature representing the patriarchal ideal of harmonious society is juxtaposed with the wild and violent nature of Ossian. According to Brown, this "transformation of idyllic into violent nature imagery articulates the displacement of Werther's corporative ideal by his own non-corporative aspirations" (87). At times, Brown's binary construct of idyllic and violent nature representation runs the danger of appearing simplistic, deterministic, and capricious. Are there not, one is tempted to ask, literary works that encode the old, repressive, sometimes tyrannical order with violent nature imagery, and are there not literary works that reflect the new bourgeois social order— and its initial upheavals, like the French Revolution—in terms ofa liberating, growing, and healing nature? Nevertheless, the paradigm ofviolent nature imagery is valuable for a sociohistorical understanding of the eighteenth century, as well as for a literary interpretation of the specific works chosen by Brown. His central argument, that "where idyllic nature imagery reinforces static values, violent nature destroys their fixed settings, signifying ferment and change" (130), is an imaginative treatment of the dialectic of enlightenment, liberation, and revolution. This study is a readable and informative contribution to the discourse of eighteenth-century German bourgeois culture. RALPH W. BUECHLER University of Nevada, Las Vegas A. B. CHAMBERS. Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: SeventeenthCentury Praise and Restoration Satire. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. 208 p. In comparing Andrew Marvell's methodology to that of a Talmudic scholar who examinee "every significant detail ofthe particular case in its relationship to all other relevant particulars" (3), Chambers is aptly characterizing his own approach in this stimulating volume. He scrutinizes primary texts and sifts through an enormous range of background material, mustering formidable evidence to support his central thesis that "the door through which Dryden 70Rocky Mountain Review made his entrance to become the dominant literary figure ofthe Restoration was pried open earlier" by Waller and Marvell (viii). In the process, Chambers does much to reestablish Edmund Waller's pivotal—and undervalued—role in the development of seventeenth-century panegyric and Restoration satire. Waller and Marvell share the same political milieu and both write occasional poetry, similarities that Chambers utilizes to identify their more important differences in technique and temperament. Waller, though necessarily attentive to specific details ofthe occasion he is commenting upon, is, typically, most concerned with communicating a preconceived message; and this preference for "generalized truth" over concrete detail earns him, often rightfully, his reputation for superficiality. But Chambers shows that when Waller deviates from this pattern, specifically in "On St. James's Park As Lately Improved by His Majesty" and "Instructions to a Painter," his poems attain the status ofmajor seventeenth-century works, providing the motivation and interpretive context for the later painter poems. Marvell, in contrast, displays an intense antipathy for "imprecise thinking and writing" and his poetry reveals that he "regularly ransacked anything he could lay hands on in an effort to scrutinize whatever the subject might be from as fully informed a position as possible" (3). Chambers substantiates this assessment in the chapter that follows by doing some ofhis own ransacking. He reexamines the longstanding "glew/dew/hew" dispute of "To His Coy Mistress" as a way ofilluminating the poem and Marvell's allusive technique. Chambers explores an assortment of classical and Biblical texts and commentaries to discover the intellectual traditions...